During laparoscopic surgery, a distal laparoscope lens frequently becomes contaminated due to contact with blood or tissue, or may become foggy due to condensation. When the lens becomes contaminated or foggy, the lens provides a reduced visibility. This reduced visibility generally requires a surgeon to remove the laparoscope, clean the lens, soak the lens in warm saline in a thermos to prevent fogging when returned into a warm humid environment of an abdomen, and finally replacing the laparoscope into the abdomen. Often, when the laparoscope is replaced, the laparoscope lens may touch tissue in or at a distal end of a cannula requiring the cleaning procedure to be repeated. These activities are generally repeated several times during a surgery.
Repeated removal of the laparoscope for lens cleaning interrupts the surgical procedure, wasting valuable time in the operating room. These interruptions are a frustration to the surgeon(s), cause delay in the operation, and may complicate the operation as well. For example, after the laparoscope is reinserted into the abdomen (following a cleaning procedure), the laparoscope will need to be rotated and adjusted to return to a previous view, and a step in the procedure is generally restarted where the interruption occurred. Stopping and restarting the procedure can lead to mistakes. Also, a frequent source of offending contamination includes a severed blood vessel. In such an instance, at a time that this issue should be dealt with quickly, the surgeon may not be able to see well enough to stop the bleeding, and thus, the procedure may need to be interrupted while the bleeding continues in order to clean the laparoscope lens.